Printer manager questions
Dave Higton
I right in thinking that it is not possible for an application to
select which one is the active one?
The entire printer protocol seems to be predicated on using a single
active printer. If I send a file to the printer manager, it can
only be sent to the currently active printer, right?
But multiple files are automatically queued to that single printer,
right?
It looks to me as if a print server on a RISC OS machine can only
serve out one printer, unless it bypasses the printer manager
completely and drives the printers directly. In that case, I
take it that RISC OS's printer manager could only access any of
those printers by directing its output to the print server, else
chaos would ensue.
Dave
Peter Naulls
>
> It looks to me as if a print server on a RISC OS machine can only
> serve out one printer, unless it bypasses the printer manager
> completely and drives the printers directly. In that case, I
> take it that RISC OS's printer manager could only access any of
> those printers by directing its output to the print server, else
> chaos would ensue.
>
Threatening to write a new printer manager? ;-) Perhaps integrating
it with what you've done already, to give it proper networking
features etc.
I'm afraid this is just throwing out ideas, and my experience
with RISC OS printing is rather superficial and was somewhat
frustrating, due to issues relating I think to what you mention here,
and the way the USB printing is something (IIRC) of a hack on
RISC OS 5.
davehigton
> Dave Higton wrote:
>
> > It looks to me as if a print server on a RISC OS machine can only
> > serve out one printer, unless it bypasses the printer manager
> > completely and drives the printers directly. In that case, I
> > take it that RISC OS's printer manager could only access any of
> > those printers by directing its output to the print server, else
> > chaos would ensue.
>
> Threatening to write a new printer manager? ;-) Perhaps integrating
> it with what you've done already, to give it proper networking
> features etc.
:-) No. I've written a print server, which communicates with the
printer manager. That's fine in a simple situation of a single
printer,
but users have suggested that support of multiple printers would be
desirable.
The idea of enhancing the facilities offered by the present printer
manager, to support spooling (which is all my server is doing) to
multiple printers, did occur to me yesterday. I have no idea how
big a task that would be, nor whether it's worthwhile in view of
the number of people who would use it. Being able to
enumerate the printers that are connected, and being able to
spool to any chosen one rather than the currently selected one
(which implicitly requires multiple queues), would be nice-to-
haves.
> I'm afraid this is just throwing out ideas, and my experience
> with RISC OS printing is rather superficial and was somewhat
> frustrating, due to issues relating I think to what you mention here,
> and the way the USB printing is something (IIRC) of a hack on
> RISC OS 5.
Curious. I've never had cause to suspect that it's a hack. It has
always worked for me. What do you think might be substandard?
Dave
Martin Wuerthner
ups.com>
davehigton <daveh...@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
1) It relies on an explicit mapping file from vendor/product id to
automatically choose a printer definition file, but that is bound to
fail because some popular vendors use the same id for different
models. The only way to stop !Printers from automatically selecting a
printer definition is to remove the offending entry from the USBMap
file. Fortunately, the USBMap file is almost empty to begin with, but
one of the few entries it contains catches a lot of printers
incorrectly.
2) There is no way to set the connection of a given printer to USB
after installing a printer definition file manually. That is very
annoying and inconsistent. Fortunately, Ian Hamilton's PrtSet2USB
solves that problem.
Pop-up printers was a good attempt at automating the printer
installation process in an almost Windows-like way, but it would
require further work to achieve that goal properly and it needs to be
made more consistent with the rest of !Printers. In particular the
fact that you cannot select the USB option manually in the Connections
window has confused many users.
Martin
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Martin Wuerthner
Dave Higton <daveh...@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
> The Printer Manager can have more than one printer configured. Am
> I right in thinking that it is not possible for an application to
> select which one is the active one?
Not easily. A Wimp program could simulate a click on a printer icon to
switch printers plus all the required settings. Apart from that trick,
an application can only switch drivers (in the narrow sense of making
another driver module current, not in the broader !Printers sense of
activating a different printer icon), but that does not update any
other settings, so must be used with care. Draw and EasiWriter
temporarily select the PS driver to export as PostScript. Most
notably, that does not change the output destination.
> The entire printer protocol seems to be predicated on using a single
> active printer. If I send a file to the printer manager, it can
> only be sent to the currently active printer, right?
Depends on what you mean by "I". As a user, you can drag a file to any
printer. As a program, you can only print to the current printer.The
whole idea of !Printers is that only the user controls which printer
is the current printer.
> But multiple files are automatically queued to that single printer,
> right?
Multiple files can be queued to multiple printers. While one file is
spooled to a printer another one can be printed to a different
printer. This situation can also happen when ShareFS printing is used.
Alan Adams
Martin Wuerthner <spam...@mw-software.com> wrote:
> In message <f8430ca250...@dsl.pipex.com>
> Dave Higton <daveh...@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
> Depends on what you mean by "I". As a user, you can drag a file to any
> printer. As a program, you can only print to the current printer.The
> whole idea of !Printers is that only the user controls which printer
> is the current printer.
Could you not use the file save protocol to simulate a drag and drop
on any of the printers? I suspect you'd have to enumerate the icons on
the iconbar to find the appropriate place to drop it.
>> But multiple files are automatically queued to that single printer,
>> right?
> Multiple files can be queued to multiple printers. While one file is
> spooled to a printer another one can be printed to a different
> printer. This situation can also happen when ShareFS printing is used.
I fairly frequently have 3 different printers running concurrently - a
dot-matrix on USB-to-parallel converter and two networked lasers using
NetPrint.
Alan
--
Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire
al...@adamshome.org.uk
http://www.nckc.org.uk/
Dave Higton
Alan Adams <al...@adamshome.org.uk> wrote:
> I fairly frequently have 3 different printers running concurrently - a
> dot-matrix on USB-to-parallel converter and two networked lasers using
> NetPrint.
This is not directed at you... it's a general observation. It
seems that almost everybody equates "dot matrix" with "impact
dot matrix". All printers for years have been dot matrix types,
be they laser or inkjet. The only types that aren't dot matrix
are daisy wheel (surely obsolete now) and X-Y plotters that
really do move a pen in two axes; but the latter are normally
called plotters rather than printers. And even they were
superseded years ago by rasterising plotters... which print
a dot matrix.
Just an observation...
Dave
Dave Higton
> In message <61e06ea2...@bach.planiverse.com>
> Martin Wuerthner <spam...@mw-software.com> wrote:
>
> > In message <f8430ca250...@dsl.pipex.com>
> > Dave Higton <daveh...@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
>
> > Depends on what you mean by "I". As a user, you can drag a file to any
> > printer. As a program, you can only print to the current printer.The
> > whole idea of !Printers is that only the user controls which printer
> > is the current printer.
>
> Could you not use the file save protocol to simulate a drag and drop
> on any of the printers? I suspect you'd have to enumerate the icons on
> the iconbar to find the appropriate place to drop it.
That was the first thing I tried with the currently selected
printer. It doesn't produce the desired response - IIRC the
printer manager wants to invoke some application to print the
file, i.e. to convert it to printable form. Even when the
file type is Printout.
Dave
Martin Wuerthner
Dave Higton <daveh...@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
> In message <f64a85a250...@laptop.adamshome.org.uk>
> Alan Adams <al...@adamshome.org.uk> wrote:
>> I fairly frequently have 3 different printers running concurrently - a
>> dot-matrix on USB-to-parallel converter and two networked lasers using
>> NetPrint.
> This is not directed at you... it's a general observation. It
> seems that almost everybody equates "dot matrix" with "impact
> dot matrix".
Yes, that is what this term commonly means when referring to printers.
> All printers for years have been dot matrix types,
> be they laser or inkjet.
True, but neither laser nor inkjet printers are usually called "dot
matrix printers" even though they use a matrix of dots to print. The
term "dot matrix printer" has a specific meaning in the same way as
the term "mobile phone" has a specific meaning. Not every phone that
is mobile (i.e., capable of being moved) is a mobile phone. There are
lots of conventional phones that can be carried around and are
therefore mobile in the original sense of the word, but that does not
make them mobile phones.
It is not helpful to question the semantics of commonly established
terms based on literal meanings.
Martin Wuerthner
Dave Higton <daveh...@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
No, that is not correct. Any non-PostScript printer icon accepts
Printout files and sends them to the destination configured for that
particular printer icon unchanged without any other application being
involved but !Printers itself. The same goes for PostScript printer
icons and PostScript files. If you drag a Text file to a printer icon
then the text printing mechanism of !Printers is used, again without
involving any other application.
!Printers only needs the help of other applications for other file
types, e.g., Draw files are usually printed via Draw.